La Clusaz: how a small Savoyard village became the champion factory of French skiing

La Clusaz has just 1,663 residents, yet it boasts a record very few resorts in the world can claim: 11 world champions, 1 Olympic champion and 2 winners of the Winter X Games have come out of its Club des Sports, founded in 1931. A champions-per-resident ratio that would make any big city dizzy.

Guy Périllat, the first medal

It all started well before freestyle. At the 1960 Olympic Games in Squaw Valley, Guy Périllat won gold in the alpine combined, the first major triumph for a child of La Clusaz on the world stage. He would go on to become a two-time world champion. This first success laid the foundations of a local culture of competitive skiing that has never died out since.

Edgar Grospiron, the first Olympic moguls champion

Thirty years later, another child of La Clusaz made history: Edgar Grospiron became the very first Olympic champion in moguls skiing, at Albertville in 1992. He went on to win three world titles, including one on home snow, in La Clusaz itself, at the World Freestyle Skiing Championships hosted by the resort in 1995.

Candide Thovex and the birth of modern freeskiing

This is perhaps the most striking story of all. From 2002, Candide Thovex created the Candide Invitational in La Clusaz, a freeski event that would mark the history of the discipline on the Balme massif. In March 2006, he performed the biggest jump ever made off a quarterpipe there. The following year, during the 2007 edition of the Candide Invitational, he crashed heavily on “la Bertha”, a feature more than 45 metres long and 14 metres high, then the largest big air ever built, and broke a vertebra. Such stories are not the exception in La Clusaz: they are almost the norm.

In early January 2026, the resort opened a non-groomed, secured freeride area on this same Balme massif, named in his honour: the Candide Thovex run. A very tangible way of carrying on the legacy rather than settling for a commemorative plaque.

A ski area worthy of its reputation

This record did not come from nowhere: La Clusaz is organised around five distinct massifs (Beauregard, l'Étale, l'Aiguille, Balme and Manigod), offering 125 km of pistes rising to 2,600 m. That provides enough terrain and variety to shape generations of champions, while remaining accessible to families on the gentler sectors. With the Aravis pass, the ski area even reaches 220 km by including neighbouring Le Grand-Bornand.

And for lovers of hearty heritage: La Clusaz lies in the heart of Reblochon country. This raw-milk cheese originated in the 13th century in the Thônes valley, and its name is said to come from a fraudulent milking practice, “rebloche”, used to avoid the feudal tax. A festival is held in its honour in the village every August.

It is no coincidence that so many champions came from this one small village: the Club des Sports de La Clusaz has nurtured this culture of performance for nearly a century. Skiing its pistes today, it's hard not to feel that you are treading, without knowing it, the same slopes where Grospiron or Thovex learned to fly.